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Why ten conversations?
When you have a technical problem, like a car that won't start or even a painful shoulder, you analyze the problem, looking for its cause, and then you try to fix it. Most organizational problems - management and leadership issues - are not like this. The causes usually aren't obvious. Whether it is teams that don't collaborate, poor performance, a declining market share, cross-cultural issues, people struggling with new technologies, or a sense that employees don't have the drive they once had, the problems are what Ron Heifetz (in his book Leadership on the Line) calls 'adaptive'.
The causes of adaptive or tough problems aren't easy to find. Sometimes they are very complex. So, where do you begin? We specialize in enabling clients to deal with their tough problems and our answer is 'you begin with conversations'. When people talk together from their different perspectives they begin to get a handle on the problems and can start to look for solutions.
Our clients bring invaluable knowledge about what's happening in their own organizations. We have ideas that we've gathered from our consulting experience across different types of organizations, where we've seen similar problems in different contexts. That is a great knowledge base to start with. But we need to share that knowledge so we can make-meaning together of what is going on. This is where the conversations come in.
The list below comprises ten of the conversations that we'd like to have and are likely to have with our clients to begin a consulting engagement. We've distilled the issues we encounter in organizations into themes and each conversation is around one of these themes. This isn't a fixed list. These themes reflect the concerns of leaders, managers, and employees today, as seen from a consultant's standpoint. Elsewhere in this site you'll find another set of ten conversations, which we've identified as the 'internal' ones people ought to have to improve the way they work together, to be more effective in what they do, and to ramp up their performance.
Transformation
Most organizations understand that they must transform how they work if they are to succeed in an environment that is in "constant whitewater" - in constant change. Many organizations seek to break silos, become more integrated and aligned, with learning and knowledge-sharing as core organizational practices. This requires more than changing ourselves or our systems. It requires transforming the very way we see our challenges and what it takes to meet them. Transformation requires that we look to both ourselves and others for the answers. It calls for us to look again when we think the "answer" is clear. Our vision for a new future has to be aligned with actions that sustain this kind of awareness and produce lasting results. This is what we help organizations to see, to be, and to do.
Accountability
From the top to the bottom of organizations we hear the complaint is that people aren't delivering the work or they aren't doing it. That is a problem of accountability, which means being responsible for your actions. In complex, fast-paced work environments, compliance -- being accountable to the top -- is costly and ineffective. The alternative is for people hold each other accountable -- peer-to-peer accountability. That takes a change in culture and that's what we help organizations to do.
Tough problems
Have you noticed how problems that we face today, from global warming to poverty and enforcing copyright, seem intractable? These are 'tough problems' - problems that don't have answers, problems that can't easily be solved. They are clearly different from the simple problem of fixing a car that won't start. You can solve simple problems by handing them over to an expert. But you need a different set of techniques for solving tough problems, which involve multiple stakeholders. Most organizational problems are tough. We help organizations to diagnose and solve their tough problems.
Aligning
Whether the work is developing new software, launching a PR campaign, or inner-city renewal, with knowledge work it takes a whole network of people to achieve success. Aligning is about people coming together and cooperating to get things done. Most organizations are fragmented. There are silos and boundaries; while people have multiple commitments, conflicting schedules, and don't know what others are doing. Aligning requires a different way of working, where people are intentional about their commitments and responsibilities and hold each other accountable. We help organizations to create a culture that supports aligning.
Conversations
In the industrial era, when there were 'men, materials, and machines', work meant producing a tangible product. Now, the materials and machines have gone and only people remain. So, what is work? Knowledge workers provide a service and their work is sharing knowledge. They contribute their knowledge to the 'pool of knowledge' in a team or network. Conversations are the tools of knowledge workers. But most knowledge workers aren't aware of this, they aren't intentional about their conversations, and the culture of organizations doesn't help them. So we help organizations to see the value of conversations and coach people to engage in conversations that enable them to become better knowledge workers and to do good work.
Communities of Practice
Increasingly, people are working in teams and groups (such as project groups) but the dominant mindset is still the chain-of-command. Are there models for organizing work that suit team work? Communities of practices comprise people who work together and, in the process, share knowledge and develop shared practices that enable them to do their work effectively. This is a useful model, but making participative practices work is a tough problem for organizations. We help organizations to understand how communities of practice function, when and where they will be of value, and how organizations can support them.
Sharing Knowledge
Knowledge is the stuff that professionals work with today. In the industrial era it was steel or plastic or wood, but today the main ingredient of work in hospitals, government agencies, software developers, law firms, transport consultants, and political campaign headquarters is knowledge. Organizations have a hard time seeing that the real work is in sharing knowledge. It's when people get together, interact, and talk that the work gets done (e.g. the planning sessions, telephone calls, emails, and so on. Organizations tend to operate as if what's in databases or in peoples heads is what counts. We help to move them from that mindset to one where sharing knowledge matters and that's what gets rewarded.
Adaptive Leadership
We build on this theory and method developed by Dr. Ronald Heifetz of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Adaptive leadership is a way of approaching our tough problems by taking risks, exposing conflict and mobilizing attention on the core issues. It is not just about getting a new result, but finding new ways to shift our own and others' values, habits and beliefs at every step along the way. Adaptive challenges - our tough problems -- cannot be solved by outside experts. They require us to get outside of our usual roles and to find new ways to listen and learn -- to exercise leadership from a place of purpose. We believe that leadership can be learned and that it must be practiced. We aren't leaders because we are given the position or the title. We lead by seeing, by developing new ways of knowing, by partnering with those who we are wont to marginalize, and by emerging with new possibilities for the kind of world we want to live in.
Organizational Coaching
Coaching is now a common practice in the business world. Many organizations offer their top people access to a coach to improve performance, work on the development of emotional intelligence or to shift specific behaviors in real time. In addition, many organizations are using coaching to work with teams. In both circumstances the coaching is designed to create the possibility for new or different results. Organizational coaching incorporates individual and group coaching and starts to connect culture, context, and conversations within the organization. OCL is leading the way in developing this new field of organizational coaching across the sectors.
Multiple Bottom Lines
Organizations are being asked to think and behave in ways that go beyond traditional business models. 21st century organizations will be measured by achieving success in multiple bottom lines (profit, people, and planet). We help organizations (public, private, and not-for-profit) make a transition to multiple bottom lines.
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